A Remarkable Rescue

Seventh-day Adventist Publishing Association · Battle Creek, Mich. · Aug 19, 1873

A Remarkable Rescue.

An eastern exchange gives the following account of the fortunes of a young man under the fetters of rum:—

“A few years ago, on any sunny morning, a heap of filthy rags might be seen stretched on some of the bales of a paper warehouse in a neighboring city, with a strong smell of stale tobacco and whisky hanging about it. Turning it over (which you could do as though it were a log, any time after 10 o’clock in the morning) you would find the swollen, purple face of what had once been a handsome young man; but there was little hope that the bleared eyes or thick tongue would give an intelligent answer. The porters passing by would push him aside, but not roughly. The time had been when he was a jolly, generous young fellow, and a favorite in the office. ‘Young Rodgers:’ some would give you his history in five minutes: ‘Taken to rum—no choice—poor fellow.’ The proprietor could not turn him out to starve, so still gave him a nominal salary, and suffered him to hang about the house, lest he should take to worse courses than drinking. There were hints, too, of a widowed mother, away off in the country, who had been dependent on him, and a sweetheart, a pretty, clinging girl, both of whom, long ago, he had abandoned. But there was nothing to be done. The end, through the usual horrors of delirium tremens, was apparently not far off.

“One day, as Rodgers was creeping to the nearest bar for his morning bitters, a man whom he barely knew by sight took him by the elbow, and walked with him into a quieter street. ‘They tell me you are Richard Rodgers’ son,’ he said. ‘Dick Rodgers was the only friend I had for years, and for his sake I’d like to save his boy. Are you willing for me to try?’ ‘Oh! you can try,’ muttered the lad, with an imbecile laugh. This nameless friend, nothing daunted, took him to a chamber in his own house, and put him to bed. There he and his sons kept watch, and guarded the poor wretch for months like a prisoner, keeping liquor from him, and trying to supply it by medical treatment. A physician, he employed, but he was not able to pay for a nurse. Any one who has had to deal with a victim of mania-a-potu can guess how difficult and loathsome a task he had set himself. Ungrateful enough it was at first, for Rodgers struggled against his tormentors with the ferocity of—just what he was—a starving animal. As reason began to return, and his unnatural strength to vanish, he would beg them in his intervals of reason not to fail him, but to work out the experiment either to success or death. ‘It is my last chance,’ he would cry; ‘for God’s sake, be patient.’ This friend, with his son, did work it through all the foul, unmentionable details, and the end was not death, but success.

“‘How soon,’ asked a friend of Rodgers afterwards, ‘were you trusted alone?’ ‘Not for two years,’ he answered, laughing. ‘I was out of jail, but in jail bounds. Do you remember that lank, muscular young fellow who had a desk beside me in the office? He took it with the condition that he could leave it to dog me night and day, to my meals and to my bed. That was the son of the man who saved me. He was taken from a lucrative situation in order that he might become my jailor. God bless him! How I used to curse him! ‘Can’t you trust my honor?’ I would cry. ‘I’m not convinced that your honor has not the consumption,’ the Scotch-Irishman would say. ‘We’ll put no burdens on it till it has regained its health.’

“‘Your friend was a wealthy man, no doubt, and so able to give both time and money to your case?’ ‘On the contrary, he is but the owner of a small hat store, and supports his family out of that. He is rich or noble only in the deed and spirit of friendship.’

“‘All this was years ago. Rodgers is now an industrious, honorable man, married to his old love, with his gray-haired mother by his hearth, bringing to it the perpetual benediction of benignant old age. His friend sells hats—makes no speeches of any sort in the world. Nobody has recognized in him a hero. Yet who, for the sake of a dead or living friend, would go and do likewise?’”